Collision With Prophecy

Collision With Prophecy #12:
The Final Lie

Introduction

In our last meeting (Janet Reno's Worst Nightmare), we saw what the Bible really says about the second coming. And it is coming up. But not if Satan has anything to say about it!

Back in the garden of Eden, the devil told the first lie. "If you disobey God, you shall not surely die" (Genesis 3:1), or so he said. Eve proceeded to disobey God. Eve died. More than that, Jesus experienced the equivalent of the second death in her place. Death did indeed result from that initial sin. But back to that horrifying conversation, the opening salvo into misery for our race. In fact, he (Satan) launched his conversation with her by asking a seemingly innocuous question: "Has God said . . ." His opening ploy was to question God's word, and then offer a counter-interpretation of God's actual intentions. Study it. He claimed to Eve that God was trying to hide knowledge from her.

What is more interesting to us, however, is that Satan has not only not stopped telling lies, but has honed and amplified his technique as he has been propelled toward the end of time. He knows that God has no intention of letting sin continue for eternity, and so down through the ages he has been quite aware that there would come a point in time when it was all or nothing‹when everything was at stake, and he must tell the final lie. I'm here to suggest to you tonight that he already told this final lie over a century and a half ago, and that today it permeates Christendom.

Like that first lie, it questions God's word and it offers a counter-interpretation of God's intentions. His final lie is his closing attempt to nullify the impact of the prophecies given through God's Spirit--especially the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation dealing with the end-times. So tonight let me share with you from God's Word what we might well call our adversary's attempt to tell us the final lie.

I'll be very plain now. Tonight, many sincere Christian persons believe that God is going to "rapture" them out of this world before a period of time widely hailed as "the tribulation." They've been taught that the seventieth week of Daniel's prophecy (Daniel 9:24-27) has been "cut-off" from the first 69 weeks. But friends. Is it so?

Looking at the Systems

In order to understand our questions, we need to make certain that we are using the principles and systems of interpretation that our God has built into the Bible. We might object that a system is not needed to understand it's teachings. But we must recognize that the Bible presents an internally-consistent set of beliefs. Since "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21), and the Word itself proclaims the necessity of "right division" (2 Timothy 2:15) while studying it, the Bible itself makes clear that within it are beliefs arranged according to its own system. The especially figurative nature of many prophecies also lends to them a special potential for mistaken interpretations. The key to understanding Bible prophecy then must be to derive from the Bible itself its own internal presuppositions. Only by discovering the Bible's "own" system can we come to understand it.

We must be very careful to avoid eisogesis, that is, to read into the Bible ideas and presuppositions that do not originate in the Scriptures. Likewise, we need to exercise careful exegesis, the drawing out from the Bible of the meaning that God has already put into it. One way means we use the Word, the other way means we receive the Word; one way imposes human ideas upon the Bible, and the other exposes God's ideas in the Bible. Of the three major systems used to understand Bible prophecy today, only one is derived from the Bible's own internal system. And we want to lay hold of that one!

The three major systems by which prophecy is interpreted today are:

Preterist (placing the fulfillment of almost all prophecy in the past).
Futurist (placing the fulfillment of almost all prophecy in the future).
Historicist (understanding events to fulfill steadily and sequentially).

We must understand that if we use God's method of interpretation, we may come up with results that won't be PC (politically-correct). This raises the question, what happens when we use the above methods? What about, for example, historicism?

The Pointing Finger of Prophecy

Historicists understand prophecy to be constantly fulfilling in a progression of events throughout history. It is universally agreed that the historicist understanding was the one held by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. (NOTE: Historicist is NOT even close to "historical-critical; these terms have a wholly different meaning from one another.)

For most of the time since the close of the Bible canon of 66 books, Bible prophecy was interpreted in historicist fashion. This system, following the guidance of Biblical prophecies such as Daniel two, understood the general pattern of prophecy to be the sequential fulfillment of events. For example, in Daniel two we find an image of a man composed from top to bottom of distinct types of metals, from the head of gold, the chest of silver, the thighs of brass (bronze) etc. on down. It is clear from Daniel's interpretation of the prophecy that it portrays a sequence of kingdoms: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, etc. This pattern is found again in Daniel seven and eight, and elsewhere, and constitutes a basic element in rightly dividing the Word. To rightly understand time prophecies, we look for an unfolding sequence of events, from the time of the prophet on down to the second coming of Christ.

Early historicist-style interpretation was pushed to the margins when Augustine's (A. D. 354-430) views began to take hold. But God would not let them continue to be hidden away. The right time came, and God began to move. By around the year A. D. 1000 Arnulf, Bishop of Orleans became the first to suggest that the Pope was antichrist. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-1253) became the first to identify the antichrist as a system. By the 13th century Eberhard II, archbishop of Salzburg identified the pope as the little horn of Daniel 7. Another interpreter, Nahawendi, had first utilized the Scriptural day-for-a-year principle in the ninth century A. D. As these insights began to flow together and fall into place, the light really began to brighten. Letting the Bible interpret itself made the outcome quite plain. The result of the historicist interpretation of Bible prophecy was, that by the early 16th century, the Protestant reformers could find only one religious entity that possibly could be identified as the beast of Revelation 13:1-10 and the little horn of Daniel 7. When Bible prophecy clearly identified that religio-political church system as the beast of Bible prophecy, it resulted in a most uncomfortable situation. The finger of prophecy was pointing squarely at the Roman Catholic Church as the beast of Revelation 13.

Remember. We looked carefully into those Scriptures and found eight plain, clear, identifying marks for the beast of Revelation 13:1-10, the same entity known as the "little horn" of Daniel chapter seven. They were:

First Point of Identification: The little horn came up "among the ten;" this places it geographically in Western Europe.
Second Point of Identification: It came up after the ten arose
Third Point of Identification: It would uproot three of the ten tribes.
Fourth Point of Identification: He shall be diverse from the first horns.
Fifth Point of Identification: He shall speak great words against the most High.
Sixth Point of Identification: He shall wear out the saints of the most High.
Seventh Point of Identification: He shall think to change times and laws.
Eighth Point of Identification: The length of his reign: 1260 years.

When we looked carefully at these back in Big Words. Little Horn, we plainly saw what the beast was: a religious system subtly counterfeiting and thus attempting to take away "the daily" sacrifice. It was clear and plain. It was uncomfortable. But it was truth.

The Roman Catholic Church Responds With the Counter-Reformation

Friends, if the condemning finger of Bible prophecy were pointing at the very church you belong to, you'd get real uncomfortable. You really would. And if the expositors of the Bible were often common folk, perhaps not even priests or ecclesiastics, and you as a priest found that you could not give a sound counter-explanation that made any sense, your blood pressure would greatly increase. You would face two options: either admit the reformers were right and abandon the church that your whole life and position seemed to be inextricably entwined with, or, you would search high and low for a workable counter-explanation; something--anything--to readjust the pointing finger of God, to take the heat off.

I wish friends, that I could say everyone took the most noble course, studied it out, acknowledged the truth of the matter, and abandoned the beast.

Some did. The majority, content with things as they were, unable to imagine anything other than a world in which the church wielded ultimate power, indifferent to its corruption, stayed put. But still an explanation was needed. Therefore, Scholars of that church invested their energies in finding ways to interpret the prophecies that would NOT implicate the Catholic church as the beast. The result was twofold:

The Roman Catholic church added the Jesuit order--an order whose primary purpose was the destruction of Protestantism. (An order that still exist quite intact today!) Two great Jesuit thinkers soon proposed two highly influential systems. Ribera (1537-1591) proposed the FUTURIST interpretation of prophecy. That is, it identified the antichrist as an entity yet still to come (and thus made most prophecy inapplicable to the then-present Papacy). The antichrist, said Ribera, was an individual (not a system) who would rule during the final seven years of the Christian era. He derived many of his ideas from the early church fathers (who only recently, at the Council of Trent A.D. 1545-1563 had, by the Roman Catholic Church, been placed on an equality with Scripture for authority).

Ribera was not entirely consistent, seeing Antiochus Epiphanes as the little horn of Daniel seven and as a type of antichrist. Those following his method eventually stripped the 70th week of Daniel 9:24-27 off the end of the 490 years, and with absolutely no justification, projected it as a separate and yet future period. This is a bitter imposition upon the prophecy from outside of the Bible. It's effect is to guard certain presuppositions imposed upon this text. The genius of the futurist idea was that it appeared to use the Bible authoritatively and assigned all damaging associations off into times other than the present. It was ideally suited to deceive because it placed the antichrist forever just beyond the horizon of events, ever future.

But there was another idea. The Jesuit Alcazar (1554-1613) proposed a different system leading to a similar result. Again, perusing the writings of the early church fathers, Alcazar identified the antichrist as having already appeared. For him, antichrist was not a system, but Nero Caesar. Later this was applied much more to Antiochus Epiphanes (ruled 175-164 B.C.) Although not even the most determined squirming has ever been able, in any convincing way, to fit Antiochus into the time prophecies of Daniel. This view became widely known as the PRETERIST position, and placed most prophetic events in the past. Since these events were past, the antichrist could not be identified presently with the Roman Catholic church.

A Decaying Church Accepts Futurism

The HISTORICIST method had the disadvantage of pointing out explicitly what the last-day antichrist/beast power was. It pointed to direct prophetic fulfillment in the present. In an environment soon to become increasingly ecumenical, its conclusions would become excruciatingly unwelcome. By means of the historicist system, certain time prophecies were widely expected to reach fulfillment in the second coming in the 19^th century. When these expectations appeared to be dashed, the historicist method fell into disfavor. John Nelson Darby revived the futurist position and blended it with dispensationalism, and this ultimately became the favored interpretational system of our time.

Anyone here ever heard of the "Oxford Movement?" You've probably heard of Oxford University in England, but you may not have heard of the Oxford Movement. That doesn't change the fact that it has mightily impacted the interpretation of prophecy around the globe. You've been impacted by it. I guarantee.

Futurism had been proposed late in the 16^th century by Ribera, but it only obtained limited acceptance until a century later, when Cardinal Bellarmine took it up and made it his main argument against the Protestants. Still, it remained a view really held only by Catholics until the Oxford movement began in 1833. At that time several Protestant preachers and theologians of the Anglican church turned strangely toward Rome, and began to attack the teachings identifying the Roman Catholic Church as the antichrist power. They took up anew the Ribera/Bellarmine arguments, and for the first time, elements of Protestantism gave them currency. Between 1833 and 1845 several Protestants absorbed the thinking and came onto better terms with Catholicism. During this same period, John Nelson Darby established the Plymouth Brethren and built up a new texture for the interpretation of prophecy with his dispensational system pigeon-holing time into seven isolated segments called dispensations, in which God was said to operate in distinct and different ways. Darby made a strong distinction between what he called the "church" era and other eras, claiming a vast difference between the church and Israel. Darby's teaching inserted a "gap" or "paranthesis" between Daniel's 69^th and 70^th weeks.

Why did his views rise to popularity so quickly? Certain reasons come to mind . . .

Christendom generally had not been willing to receive the historicist interpretation of the 70 weeks that brought the conclusion of that period out to the mid 1840s, because of the implications. It meant a different gospel than what they had been used to. The situation left a vacuum, and people were searching for a different system to latch on to.
Another reason was the P-Cness of the futurist views. It was very convenient to assign the antichrist off somewhere into the vague future and not have to bother any more with the rancor sometimes attending the identification of the beast of Revelation 13:1-10.
The trends in theological thinking afoot in Europe at this time were already veering away from the historicist position. Preterism and Futurism were fast rising.
Another recently popular theory of the world's gradual betterment until the return of Christ (amillenialism), after an initial surge of interest was seen to be weak and its adherents were open to better solutions.
In 1909 the Oxford Press published C. I. Scofield's notes in its Bible, hence granting them an immense circulation. Scofield's notes were laced with Futurism.

A church ready to doubt God's Word and casting about for less-demanding solutions found them in the Jesuit counterfeits. God's motivations and plans were reinterpreted. Many were ready to preserve the status quo and avoid the implications of the historicist views by turning their minds to other ideas. The tide was turning. All the world was already beginning to look back and to wonder after the beast (Revelation 13:3).

Hey--How Did they Do That?

George Eldon Ladd makes an observation that I think is very true. Here's what he says:

It will probably come as a shock to many modern futurists to be told that the first scholar in relatively modern times who returned to the patristic futuristic interpretation was a Spanish Jesuit named Ribera. In 1590, Ribera published a commentary on the Revelation as a counter-interpretation to the prevailing view among Protestants which identified the Papacy with the Antichrist. Ribera applied all of Revelation but the earliest chapters to the end time rather than to the history of the church. G. E. Ladd, The Blessed Hope, p. 37.

He is right. This is actually a very recent teaching. The rapture was appended (added on to) the futurist teaching in the 1800's by John Nelson Darby. Its origin point is very interesting. According to S. P. Tregelles, an individual also belonging to Darby's Plymouth brethren at that time and a very well known scholar of his day, the idea of a secret rapture arose from a glossalalia (tongues-speaking) incident in a nearby church. "It was from that supposed revelation that the modern doctrine and the modern phraseology respecting it arose. It came not from holy Scripture, but from that which falsely pretended to be the Spirit of God." (Tregelles quoted in G. E. Ladd's, The Blessed Hope, pp. 40-41). What's more, I actually tracked down one of the original visions from which this teaching is said to have originated. A lady in Scotland named Margaret McDonald had a "vision" which included the following statements:

"Only those who have the light of God within them will see the sign of His appearance . . . Tis' only those that are alive in Him that will be caught up to meet Him in the air . . . Those who were filled with the Spirit could see spiritual things, and feel walking in the midst of them, while those who had not the Spirit could see nothing‹so that two shall be in one bed, the one taken and the other left . . ." Margaret MacDonald quoted by Jim McKeever in The Incredible Cover-Up, p. 152).

Now let me back up for a minute. I am not against visions. God is indeed the God of the living. He can give visions in our day if He wants to. But anything claiming to be a vision from God has to line up with His Word, the Bible. We mustn't take a shortcut on this. So what about this vision and this teaching? I seriously doubt that they are from God. Let's turn to this teaching for a moment and see what is taught and then see if it can stack up to Scripture or not.

Consider the assumptions this teaching is forced to make:

God works differently in different ages. One age is an age of grace, another an age of law, etc. But when you study the whole of the Bible, suddenly there are exceptions everywhere. Noah found grace, David did too, and the list of these exceptions immediately grows longer and longer. To propose seven dispensational divisions is to be quite arbitrary.
Israel and the Church are different. This teaching requires that there be a stark contrast between the church and Israel. But Scripturally we are bound to question this. What happened to Israel is an example for us. To them the gospel was preached as well as unto us. They too found grace and lived by faith. Paul's famous "the just shall live by faith" quotation originated not in the mind of Paul, but at the pen-point of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk. The ultimate craziness of this is that it removes most of the gospels from validity for Christians today. They are declared to be "Jewish" documents. I have news for those making such a declaration. The whole Bible is grounded in Jewishness! Virtually every writer was Hebrew! Even the New Testament, written in Greek, was written almost entirely in the style of the Hebrew sense of ideas. This is simply what God chose to do. I become afraid when sensible people are willing to let their teachers assign off into irrelevance this or that portion of the Bible.
Seventy contiguous weeks does not mean seventy contiguous weeks. This is absurd. O.K. then. I'm really six foot six. There is a just a "gap" or "parenthesis" of 11 inches!

Here's what Dr. Gerhard Hasel says about this teaching:

This interpretation separates the seventieth or last week from the prophecy and positions it at the end of the age. The era or 'parenthesis' that is thus created by splitting the seventieth week from the previous 69 is designated the 'Church age.' Such a procedure, however, violates the integrity of the prophecy and is without biblical precedent. Gerhard Hasel in"Interpretations of the Chronology of the Seventy Weeks," in Seventy Weeks, Leviticus, Nature of Prophecy, (vol. 3, Daniel and Revelation Committee Series), p. 5.

Hasel goes on to outline ten major problems with the futurist/dispensationalist theory. Among the problems are chronological ones (dates chosen either cannot fit or require the arbitrary insertion of additional days), calculation problems (unwarranted assumptions about how to do the math), reliance on assumed dates, requiring the death of Christ in A. D. 32 or 33 (which doesn't fit the biblical information), the Scripturally unsupported imposition of arbitrary gaps into prophecies, and the suggestion that the Messiah in verse 26-27 is antichrist (an idea which runs against the syntax of the text). The problems are great. Why? Because an idea has been imposed upon the Bible from outside of itself. This idea is the word, not of God, but of man.

This is called eisogesis. It's a no-no in Bible interpretation.

In fact, as Ladd has traced out, many who were early involved in the movement during its first century have become post-tribulationists and given it up. Ladd's book has a barrel full of such quotations. Here's just one of them, this by Dr. Harold John Ockenga:

"Is it conceivable that the Jews without the Pentecostal presence and power of the Holy Spirit will do during the tribulation what the church in Holy Spirit power could not do in 2000 years?" . . . "No amount of explaining can make (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) a secret rapture. It is the visible accompaniment of the glorious advent of the Lord. No exegetical justification exists for the arbitrary separation of the 'coming of Christ' and the 'day of the Lord.' It is one 'day of the Lord Jesus Christ.'" "Another shattering blow to my dispensational eschatology came when I realized that the church age is not a parenthesis in the divine redemptive plan, but is the great era of redemption, of salvation, and of revival." John Ockenga, quoted in G. E. Ladd's, The Blessed Hope, p. 58.

And he is right. You can¹t just peel-off the seventieth week arbitrarily and insert a tribulation there. It's just not in the Bible. It does violence to Scripture. It is banking on an empty account, and the account of dispensational futurism is quite overdrawn. Its roots take us right back to Catholicism. We don't belong there. We know too much.

How did they do that? How did they arbitrarily separate the seventieth week from the rest of the prophecy? Simple. They acquiessed to faulty assumptions which led them to take unwarranted liberties with the Word of God.

The Shape of Today and of Tomorrow

And so today, a vast number of Christians the world over have been taught to interpret Bible prophecy along the very lines that hundreds of years ago the agents of the Papacy fed the world. Today, most "conservative" Christians follow the futurist system, most liberal Christians follow the Preterist, while but one major group remains still adhering to the historicist system.

So. What is the bottom line? Again, is the system consistent with the Bible's internal presuppositions about itself? Does it come from the Bible, or is it imposed upon the Bible? Let us be plain. If Futurism or Preterism can truly meet this criteria, then we must consider those systems to be potentially valid. Unless something better comes along, we might need to make use of them. But the only method letting Scripture interpret itself is the HISTORICIST. Remember, both FUTURISM and PRETERISM historically are predominantly based upon the writings of the early church fathers so-called--and not upon Scripture. Only a system truly based upon the Bible can have our allegiance. Historicism derives from Scripture the understanding that the prophecies are fulfilling sequentially, and so it is dynamic. It, as do the other two methods, sees some elements as past and some as future in fulfillment also, but, in harmony with Scripture, it does not exclude virtually everything from the present as do these other methods.

Christians today are far behind in investigating these matters. It is late in the hour to drink from the intoxicating bottle of Jesuit prophetic interpretation modes. A re-investigation of the Scriptures and the outcomes presented by the historicist system is important, irregardless of "politically incorrect" or "socially embarrassing" ramifications.

Few have said it better than Leroy Edwin Froom:

When Rome was ruling the Western world, a large group of contemporary students of prophecy recognized and proclaimed the identity and fate of the fourth prophetic world empire. When Rome was in process of tenfold division, another cluster of expositors left the written record of their perception, and their fears, of the coming Antichrist. When the papal Little Horn had unveiled its real character and identity, a great host of Reformers in many lands gave their witness to this advancing and then-present fulfillment of prophecy--so powerfully that it brought on the Counter Reformation with its clever countersystems of interpretation. L. E. Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. III, p. 741.

Conclusion and Preview

This has been another one of those meetings where it has been especially necessary to share unpleasant facts. And things are not standing still. Today we are alive to witness the final triumph of futurism. Christians by the bushel are buying-into an ill-founded belief system--one that was only created to salvage the reputation of the beast of Revelation 13. And what shall we say of the so-called "Protestant" Christians who are buying? They may not realize it, but they are accepting teachings founded by the Roman Catholic Churches' Jesuit order entirely for the purpose of destroying--completely destroying--Protestantism. Little do they know that they have been in the process of engraving the very tombstone of what's left of their own Reformation past.

The arbitrary amputation of the seventieth week of Daniel nine by Protestants and evangelical Christians, we've been reminded tonight, has absolutely no foundation in Scripture. It is a belief imposed upon the Bible from outside. Nothing is without consequence friends. The results are unsound theological innovations and dangerous salvific land-mines, including second-chance theology, and expectations of pre-tribulation rapture--teachings not sustained by the Bible.

But someone might say, "well, that's all prophecy stuff. At least today's churches are teaching God's gospel of grace. We'll sort all of this out when we get to the kingdom. Why make such a big fuss over it now?" And that, brothers and sisters, is our next topic. Are you so sure that our understandings even of faith and grace have not been twisted-up along the way? Our next meeting will walk through one of the Bible's clearest passages on salvation. We'll see. We'll see. Come to " Stealing Candy From Babies. Let us pray in closing . . .

Larry Kirkpatrick, 5 November 2000